Cézanne, Paul: Portraits

Even Cézanne's pictures of people can be regarded as still lifes, because
he demanded that his models sit absolutely still. Sitting for him was
something of a nightmare. Not only was he foul-tempered, he was an
extremely slow painter, probably the reason his subjects always look tired
and sombre. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who arranged Cézanne's first
one-man show a century ago, posed 115 times for a single painting, sitting
absolutely still "like an apple" and then Cézanne, dissatisfied,
abandoned the picture with only two unpainted spots remaining. He told
Vollard that with luck he would find the correct color and could finish
the painting. "The prospect of this made me tremble," noted Vollard in
his biography of the painter. In the artist's eye, there was no difference
between a human sitter and a bowl of fruit, except that the reflection
value and the palette were different. In the end, both his subjects and
his fruit wilted.

Geffroy, Gustave
(1855-1926)
A radical journalist who commenced his career on Clemenceau's paper
Justice. His literary activities later took many forms;
he wrote extensively about current political and social injustices
and published a number of novels with a strongly
Realist bent.
His interest in painting and especially in
Impressionism
was kindled by a visit he paid to
Manet's studio in 1876,
as a consequence of which he came into contact with all the other
artists of the group, as well as
Rodin,
and maintained an on-going
correspondance with most of them. His closest connection was with
Monet, whom he first met at Belle-Ile
in 1886 and about whom, some 30 years later, he wrote a book --
Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre (1824) --
which is still valuable in many ways.

All his writings about Impressionism are significant and amongst the
most intelligently perceptive of his time. His articles about
contemporary art were collected in the eight volumes of
La Vie artistique, published between 1892 and 1903,
the third volume, entitled
Histoire de l'impressionisme,
being the most comprehensive book about the movement that had so far
appeared. It consisted of a historical opening section followed
by individual chapters devoted to each artist. He also wrote
introductions to the catalogues of one-person exhibitions by
Pissarro, Monet, Rodin and
Morisot,
as well as to that of the sale of the
Burty
collection. He ended his career as the director of the Gobelins
tapestry factory.